Review: BATTLE FOR THE COWL #3
Author: Paul Casey
May 21, 2009
FROM DC COMICS: With the destruction of Arkham Asylum, the return of the Black Mask, and dozens of Gotham City's most lethal villains rioting through the streets, Nightwing, Robin and their allies seem to have their hands full. But when you add a deadly Jason Todd masquerading as a gun-toting Batman to the mix, things have definitely spiraled out of control!
This is the issue everyone's been waiting for – find out who wins the Battle for the Cowl! Who earns the right to take on the mantle of the Bat? Will it be Robin? Jason Todd? Nightwing? Azrael? Catwoman? Two-Face? Damian Wayne? Batwoman? Or someone completely unexpected? This 3-issue series continues to shock and surprise as the battle comes to a startling finale for the ages!
If you were hoping for a spontaneous reversal of creative fortunes in the final issue of
BATTLE FOR THE COWL, let me inform you that the concluding entry in this mini-series is the same as the two preceding it: dull, vacuous and irrelevant. Here we are finally told that yes, Nightwing is going to be “Batman” until Caveman Bruce decides to saunter back to the cave. The final page declares this “THE BEGINNING” and you try desperately to think back on anything which occurred in this entire cash-in series which needed desperately to be told. Beyond the obviously dismal nature of
BFTC as a stand-alone story, it also fails utterly as a set-up to anything more than another cynical cash-in.
Utilizing a character like Jason Todd, whose only real importance or interest has been in death, in this way is both cynical and sleazy, while having a healthy portion of stupidity thrown on top. When Toddy falls from a great height into the drink, the lack of tension actually manages to relax muscles and cure back pain. A member of the walking dead is categorically incapable of possessing the ability to either make the audience empathize with the danger his corpse-esque body is experiencing or to feel that there is a sense of history between him and his opponent. The Jason Todd who appears here has no connection or history to anything. He confirms that DC doesn’t care about their own past and that any emotional response the audience had following his original “death” was a sneering manipulation waiting to happen. Tony Daniels might as well have used a Styrofoam Bob Hope for as much as this Jason Todd means to the mythology.
“I’ve been lying to Tim and Alfred. It wasn’t because of my fear of failure.. Or because I felt I was wrong to try to replace Batman… I refused to take on the role of my mentor because it’s what he asked me to do. In his final message to me Bruce ordered me to stay away from the cape and the cowl. And I listened. He said he had enough faith in Nightwing and Robin to carry the torch.”
Obviously, DC did not.
So instead of one lazy, well worn, badly played out exploration of his motivations we have two. This reads like an attempt to get away from the dullness of the previous issue’s “internal conflict” of Nightwing while being itself so tremendously stupid. If there is one legitimate narrative or creative reason why Nightwing would not tell Alfred and Tim, past the chance to pull a fake switcheroo on the reader then I will watch more episodes of The Wire.
Seeing BATTLE FOR THE COWL in its completion shows you the scope of its disrespect for the intelligence of its readership. This is a badly constructed, contemptuously conceived, instantly forgettable and altogether miserable chapter in Batman's history
Rude adult words appear in the illustrative video below as someone says the "F word"...
